Joseph Nechvatal is nowadays regarded somewhat as an intellectual Übermensch in some parts of New York. As one of the grand-daddies of Plunderphonics, he was responsible for some of the groundbreaking willfull deconstruction of popular culture made more famous by the likes of Negativland and John Oswald. Nothing exposes the downright silliness of Pop culture than if one chops it up into its constituent parts and mix it up. Throw in some Three Stooges, Mr. Magoo, and a sonic trash can of audio detritus, then you get the terrible noise that an eavesdropping alien would be picking up in his satellite dish near Alpha Centuri. This alone would be enough to save us from invasion.


In 1983*, there was definitely a whiff of the need to recycle the old to make something new, like there was with literature in the 60's;Plunderphonics and Hip-Hop being prime examples of this trend. Nechvatal was definitely one of the leaders in rearranging the 20th century's garbage. There's a message in there somewhere for the 21st century, in these last few years of the polar ice caps.

*(Though I have serious doubts that this cassette was released in 1983 on Sound of Pig, 'cus the catalogue number seems to suggest around 1987! But I have no doubt it was at least recorded in 1983.)

-Jonny Zchivago, Die or D.I.Y.? (Saturday 8 February 2014)

In a way, the so-called Plunderphonics movement that spread across North America in the 1980s was merely updating music with experiments already familiar from the visual arts and literature and writers like Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, William Burroughs or William Gaddis, for whom collage was a natural way to grasp reality. This implied borrowing from other people’s work, but also a total lack of prejudices toward the origin of the material, be it contemporary mainstream media, well-known Classics, advertising, legal stuff, b-movies, etc. For the Young Turks named Negativland, The Tape Beatles or John Oswald, the juxtaposition of high art with crap was part of the fun, and the question of legality and copyright infringement arised later, almost as an afterthought – a painful one, admittedly, for those actually prosecuted. This Joseph Nechvatal cassette is precisely part of this exuberant reuse, Garbage in, Garbage out strategy called Plunderphonics.

♫ Sleep was Joseph Nechvatal‘s first cassette, issued 1983, the same year he co-founded the Tellus cassette series with Claudia Gould and Carol Parkinson. It was released in New York on Al Margolis’ Sound of Pig cassette label, who released hundreds of tapes during the 1980s. Sleep is entirely made of audio debris and found sounds sourced from radio, TV, movie soundtracks and commercial music, with the occasional addition of synthesizer. Joseph says he started collecting material for this tape as early as 1979, yet the music excerpts mostly sound 1983 era. To listen to Sleep is to put your ear at one end of a sonic kaleidoscope and hear the constantly changing patterns of its endless aural collages. Side 1 is a relentless, hilarious mashup of the most ridiculous sonic signatures from the ca. 1983 period: aimless guitar solos, break beats, Bollywood films, harpsichord at the wrong speed, talk shows, etc. After two minutes of the same material, Side 2 suddenly turns to a barely audible murmuring man speaking a few words on loop mode for the remaining 20mns. A relief from the preceding audio litter or mere technical difficulties, according to point of view.